Vona Groarke, Kevin Young & Joan Margarit
Friday 26th March at 6.30pm €14/10/8
Vona Groarke
Vona Groarke was born in Co. Longford
in 1964. Her poetry collections, all
published by The Gallery Press, include
Shale (1994), Other People’s Houses
(1999), Flight (2002, shortlisted for
the Forward Prize, winner of the
Michael Hartnett Award), Juniper Street
(2006), and most recently, Spindrift,
which was a Poetry Book Society
Recommendation for autumn 2009
and has also been shortlisted for this
year’s Irish Times Poetry Now Award. In
2008, her version of Eibhlín Dubh Ní
Chonaill’s classic eighteenth-century
Irish poem was published as Lament
for Art O’Leary (Gallery Books). She
currently teaches at the University of
Manchester’s Centre for New Writing.
‘With their brilliant mix of grace, good
humour and a kind of compassionate
common sense, her poems provide
both pleasure and revelation...a
leading figure among the most
accomplished poets of her (very
talented) generation.’
Eamon Grennan
Kevin Young
Kevin Young was born in 1970 in
Lincoln, Nebraska. He is the author
of six books of poetry, including Dear
Darkness (2008), For the Confederate
Dead (2007) and Jelly Roll: A Blues
(2003), all published by Knopf.
Jelly Roll was a finalist for both the
National Book Award and the Los
Angeles Times Book Prize, and won the
Paterson Poetry Prize. As editor, he has
published five other volumes, including
the Everyman’s Library Blues Poems
(2003) and Jazz Poems (2006), and the
Library of America’s John Berryman:
Selected Poems (2004). His anthology
The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and
Healing, was published this month
by Bloomsbury. The recent recipient
of a USA James Baldwin Fellowship,
Young is Atticus Haygood Professor
of Creative Writing and English and
curator of Literary Collections and the
Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at
Emory University, Atlanta.
“Highly entertaining, often dazzling,
and, as book reviewers like to say -
but rarely about contemporary poetry
- compulsively readable.”
The New York Times Book Review
Joan Margarit
Joan Margarit was born in 1938 in
Sanaüja, Catalonia. He is an architect,
and from 1968 until his retirement was
also Professor of Structural Calculations
at Barcelona’s Technical School of
Architecture. He first published poetry
in Spanish, in 1963 and 1965, but
after a silence of ten years switched
to writing and publishing in Catalan,
quickly establishing his reputation as
a leading poet in that language. He has
published many collections in Catalan
and has translated most of his own
books into Spanish. Tugs in the Fog
(Bloodaxe, 2006), translated by Anna
Crowe (with whom he will read tonight),
is the first translation into English of his
Catalan poetry, and was a Poetry Book
Society Recommended Translation.
Bloodaxe will shortly publish two new
collections by Margarit: House of Mercy
and Strangely Happy.
“One of the best, if not the very best,
of all contemporary Catalan poets”
El Mundo